Box Introduces Box Embed to Share Content Online

By Robert Mullins |
Posted 2012-10-09

SAN FRANCISCO — Box, a provider of a cloud-delivered document-storing and -sharing service, is introducing Box Embed, which enables users to take content stored in Box and embed it in any Website or browser-based application.

Box made the announcement at Boxworks 2012, its annual user conference held here Oct. 8 and 9.

Box Embed is intended to make it easy to embed content in Websites and Web applications by supporting widely used Web-based standards, such as HTML5, rather than deal with proprietary software restrictions, said Samuel Schillace, vice president of engineering at Box.

“Box Embed is a very easy way to embed enterprise content securely into Web services and tools in a way that doesn’t force that kind of vendor lock-in and [does so] in a way that’s not complicated as you would usually expect out of enterprise software,” Schillace said.

Box Embed is described as an embeddable framework that delivers Box’s suite of collaboration and management features, including file preview, comments, tasks and search to partner and customer applications.

Embed will be available through various Box partners, starting with NetSuite, a provider of cloud-delivered ERP and financial software and SugarCRM, a provider of open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software that can be delivered on-premise or from the cloud. Other vendors that are expected to partner with Box include Jive, an enterprise social media company; Zendesk, a provider of cloud customer service software; and Oracle for its Fusion CRM applications.

Box Embed is designed to streamline the process of sharing content by enterprises with employees, partners and customers as those enterprises rely more on the cloud to get their work done, Schillace said.

“Our default stance is to be a friend of the CIO and to try to help integrate and work across all of these platforms,” he said.

At Boxworks, company executives touted the benefits of the venture-funded firm’s cloud-based platform for sharing a variety of content, including videos, documents, photos, PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets.

“Every part of our business in some way has some piece of content associated with it,” said Whitney Bouck, general manager of the enterprise business at Box, in a keynote address Oct. 8. “Content has really become the currency of modern business. It has to be an asset that you protect, that you leverage and that you take full advantage of.”

Bouck detailed the security features that Box added to its service to ease concerns about putting highly valuable business content in the cloud. Box added native multi-factor authentication, requiring a user to not only enter a username and password, but also enter a unique security code sent to their device to gain access.

Box security also requires a PIN code to access Box, particularly for smartphones or tablets, so that if they are lost or stolen, someone else can’t access Box with the device. Another security feature limits the number of devices a person can use to access Box and prevents them from saving content locally on the device. It can only be saved in the cloud.

Box recently announced the availability of a new service called Accelerator, which delivers a tenfold increase in upload speeds to the Box cloud compared with what was previously available.

Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie made a brief morning appearance Oct. 8 at the conference making light of the event’s surging attendance.

“We have over 1,500 registered attendees, which is up from over 500 last year, which is a compounded growth rate of 200 percent. We’ll be bigger than Oracle OpenWorld in the next three years,” Levie quipped.

The Oracle OpenWorld conference, held last week in San Francisco, reported 45,000 registered attendees and regularly snarls traffic near the Moscone Center convention complex here. The Boxworks conference was held at a Union Square hotel here.